After 36 years, The Long Story has published its last issue. It contains my latest novelette, “The Mongrel Gods of Thebes, Nevada.” We will miss this great journal. RIP

Tag: theodicy

I have a dear friend who recently shared with me a worry that her life has been too smooth, too free of pain and strife. She is a wonderful person—kind, deeply caring, with a heart so large that she feels the pain of others as her own. She’s had a long and profoundly good life …

I thrashed around my mind’s cage, constructing pyramids of theories and splicing religious traditions, practicing some ritual and then another with every group in heartfelt friendship but without faith, for one question remained woefully, obscenely unanswered: How can there be all this evil, all this pain in a world that belongs to an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God?